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The Lumia 610: Low Power, Low Price - Windows Phone For The Masses?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any platform in existence, if it expects to have any kind of sales traction or even existential validity, must be able to play Angry Birds. This is not negotiable. Android has Angry Birds, iPhones have Angry Birds, Windows Phone has Angry Birds, PCs have Angry Birds, browsers have Angry Birds. Even Maemo – an operating system optimized for discussing the future of Maemo on Maemo community sites – has Angry Birds, for the love of Petteri.

Angry Birds only get angrier when shut out - the Lumia 610

As a result of this, the discovery that Nokia‘s latest low-budget Windows phone, the Lumia 610, was unable to install Angry Birds from the Windows Phone marketplace created a considerable palaver. Reassurances have subsequently been given that this is simply a matter of optimizing the ubiquitous Rovio fowl-flinger, and that it will be usable in time.

For business users, the absence of Skype may be more significant, and less likely to be fixed. In fact, I can say with reasonable confidence that very few readers of Forbes are likely to want or need this phone. You may – readers on limited incomes, or with limited telephonic needs, or indeed whose offices have yet to institute BYOD policies are all welcome here. However, the Lumia 610 is not aimed at the intersecting heart of the Forbes Venn diagram.

However, just because a phone is not desirable does not make it uninteresting. The Lumia 610 is an interesting phone, and a meaningful phone for Nokia in its Windows Phone strategy.

Tango and very little cash

The 610 is the first Nokia Windows Phone to ship with the “Tango” incarnation of Microsoft’s mobile operating system. This is designed to allow the software to run on 256MB of RAM, allowing for cheaper phones. Clearly, there are some adjustments to be made.

In design, the 610 eschews the design language of the premium Lumia 800 and 900 models, in favour of a more traditional smart phone shape. In fact it very closely resembles the ur-minimalist slab, the Google Nexus One, or the Samsung Focus, or any number of other blank-faced soap-slates.

The body is plastic, with a metallic look around the sides and top edge which may, unless foil technology has significantly evolved, chip and flake over time. The front is predictably featureless except for the Nokia logo at the top and the three Windows phone soft buttons at the bottom. The back is made of a rubberised plastic to improve grip, curving around to form the bottom of the phone’s front. Removing the back shows space for the 1300mAh battery and micro SIM card. The rubberised back is common to the black and magenta versions. White and cyan versions instead have a glossy back.

The screen is again as one would expect, with a 3.7-inch diagonal and 480×800 resolution. This immediately shows a strength of the Windows phone tile interface; the home screen does not look crowded. The tiles of favorite or selected apps sit in two columns; a swipe to the right reveals a list of all installed applications.

Whatever the opposite of oleophobic is, this screen is it. Yes, I know. Oleophilic. It voraciously accumulates fingerprints, although they can be wiped off just as easily.

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Nokia like RIM is headed for the trash heap of history. Anyone who uses or is exposed a modern smartphone (iPhone or Goggle) will rightfully think this phone is a piece of junk. There are plenty of used smart phones for sale at reasonable prices (check eBay) which are far superior to this device and have literally thousands of useful and cool applications that can be added to them. The new Windows mobile OS (along with its soon to be launched PC OS) is an abomination. While thousands line up to buy any new iPhone – Nokia targets the poor and the we don’t know any better consumers? If I worked at Nokia, I would be polishing up my resume right now.

All interesting points, although I’m not sure how confident you can be about the performance of a phone you have, I assume, never seen or used.

But as soon as you say “check eBay”, you’re already thinking like a nerd, and also like an older person – someone who can spend upwards of $200 in a single click, who has a credit card and who is both able to eat the risk of a phone that may break or not work well and who has no objection to using an “old” phone. The young are young, and often have a neoteric streak: even if my old Nexus One has plenty of advantages over a far newer phone, it remains an old Nexus One.

So, the target audience of the 610 wants a simple interface, doesn’t want to do anything too RAM-intensive, wants a new phone, wants not to be shamed when they pull it out (so it either isn’t bright pink or is bright pink, depending on your peer group) and doesn’t want (or can’t) pay up front or pay much per month. That’s a fairly specific audience, but it includes a market segment which is currently getting to the end of the usable life of their dumbphones (four years behind the early adopters, but that’s fine – the early adopters are already catered to) – which may well be Nokia dumbphones. That’s especially true in international markets, where Nokia has a very fat, very long tail of bricklike phones.

As you say, Nokia is probably on a hiding to nothing if it releases a phone designed to go up against the latest iPhone and compete for iPhone buyers, because iPhone buyers want an iPhone – that’s a customer behavior related to, but not limited to, spec-balancing. The same applies to the people who are shopping for anything like high-end Android phones. The 610 isn’t competing with the SIII or the HTC One X. I’m not even sure if, in their heart of hearts, Nokia would see the 900 as competing directly with the iPhone 4S or HTC One X. That’s the lesson of the N8, which had to be discounted to sell.

Nonetheless, NOK has to do something, because right now its cash reserves are shrinking. Its current approach is to have aesthetically unusual, designed phones at a price point somewhere below the latest iPhone (the N900 and N800), a cheaper, more traditionally designed phone below that (the 710), a phone which will become cheaper below that (the 610), and then S40 phones for people who either cannot make the narrowing price leap to, or simply do not want, a smartphone. Oh, and some surviving Symbian models, which are probably not being pushed hard through the retail channels. That last will probably include the 808 – which I don’t think will shift too many units itself outside an enthusiast market but is clearly being seen by Nokia as a way to road-test some pretty impressive camera technology to create genuine difference at their future Windows Phone high end. Sort of like the N9, in that respect with the design language now seen in the higher-end Lumias.

It’s very easy to say what you’d do if you worked at Nokia. It’s more interesting to think about what you’d do if you ran Nokia. Assuming you’ aren’t just going to give up, distribute your remaining cash to your shareholders and shut down your entire operation, which you aren’t, what do you do?

I agree with everything you said. It’s sad however that MS has not gotten tango out to any U.S. prepaid companies, whereas I’ve seen multiple accounts of it doing this very thing abroad. And now Cricket comes out and says they’re on the verge of selling iPhones. My goodness, MS / NOK, wake up and get this thing out there on prepaid. Stop conceding the entire prepaid market to Android. I would go out and buy a Samsung Focus S for $250 so fast it would make your head swim.

You might disagree with Lawrence, but he’s entitled to his opinion: I do think that people often approach discussions about phones from their own perspective, and possibly neglect other markets and cultures, both internationally and intranationally. With that having been said, you’re dead right that release timing is a problem – the market is not standing still, and Windows Phone still needs momentum in the market.

“Angry Birds” requires at least 512MB of RAM to run smoothly on a PC. The Lumia 610 only allows apps to use 90Mb of memory as epr section 5 of MS Certification document. A flyingbird dropping poop on green creatures needs more than 90MB to run. No wonder we’re becoming dumber than dirt.

Well… a particular kind of flying bird needs more than 90MB to run, to be exact. The RAM of the 610 isn’t an insurmountable issue – my HTC Magic 32B had 192MB of usable RAM, and could be cajoled into playing Angry Birds, although not the same Angry Birds as RAM-richer environments got. There is less pressure to optimize RAM headroom on PCs because there will usually be plenty of RAM onboard… I don’t imagine that optimizing Angry Birds for Tango and 256MB is insurmountable, but it does raise the thorny issue of (device) fragmentation. Having apps in the marketplace which tell you that they can’t be installed on your phone is just _irritating_, and there’s a risk of buyer remorse…

The Lumia 610 is primarily designed for emerging markets such as Asia and Africa where a lot of people can’t afford to shell out for the latest 64Gb iPhone or Galaxy S3 but can afford a zippy little Windows Phone like this. It will do well